Welcome! いらっしゃいませ！

Welcome to Taste Tokyo a Japanese food blog.

 My name is Richard and I'm going 10 years strong living in Japan.

Jason Mraz called.  He wants his hat back.

Japanese food from an immigrants perspective.

I've started this food blog because I love food, particularly the way food is done in Tokyo..  However, I'm not a great cook nor do I know enough about Japanese food to write a blog about food in Tokyo.
But this guy does.

Who orders a whole leg of jamon?

This is my boyfriend Takao.  Chef, world traveller and Tokyo expert.  After living together for a few years now in Tokyo I've come to learn quite a bit about food in this overwhelming megalopolis of 34 million.  The 2 of us have been running an AirBnB in our spare room for 2 years now.  Seeing first hand some of the struggles and misunderstandings that tourists in Tokyo encounter has lead me to this:  A big flashy know it all blog about food in Tokyo! (applause)

Some common questions/concerns/observations I've gotten/heard/overreacted too include:

1. "Do you ever get sick of eating Japanese food?" (question)

I find this one harder and harder to answer without being visibly frustrated. Why on earth would I only eat Japanese food? If you're visiting from the developed world and staying in what could be the most developed piece of land on planet earth why would you assume that the only food option available to you would be local cuisine?

For reference, I give to you restaurants as displayed on Trip Advisor for New York City and Tokyo. Take a look at the numbers of restaurant listings:

I'm betting you didn't expect Tokyo to have nearly 3 times the number of Italian restaurants as New York. I just surprised myself seeing the amount of Steak Houses Tokyo has. Now of course these numbers just reflect Trip Advisor tags and not actual numbers of restaurants, I just wanted to give you an idea of the amount of food and TYPES of food being chowed down on in Tokyo. Hence, my Tokyo Food blog. I decided it's time to catalog the shit out of this place.

2. "How do you even know where to go?"  (Concern) 

This question is totally legit and this is where I want to help. When I go overseas I'm always keen to get a locals take on what's good and what I might want to avoid. Yet alas, I don't speak French, Italian or any other languages that might be useful when traveling outside Japan or the English speaking world. So, what I look for are food blogs written by english speakers, immigrants and expats who have made that country their new home. 

Tokyo is my home.

And my home has a shit ton of restaurants.

Take a look at this picture of Kabuki Cho.

It's a little hole in the wall on the right.  See it?

See all of those signs? Basically all of them are restaurants. Jammed together on one street. Overwhelming, visually impairing, intimidating. In most countries I have visited you can generally look at a street from left to right and decide where you might like to eat. In Tokyo you need to look left, right and up. Way up....and occasionally down. You may come across a 9 story building where each floor is a different restaurant. I hope to help (over time) distill this information for you, because there is a lot of it. So, Taste Tokyo happened (also the domain name was WAY cheaper than TastyTokyo)

3. "You took him to a French restaurant? You don't go Tokyo to eat French food!"
-A friend of mine when we took his boyfriend out for French when he was visiting.

I appreciate this sentiment. When you visit a foreign country you should be immersing yourself in the local cuisine. But you don't have to! If you visited New York would you limit yourself to only American staples? Of course not? You'd be shoveling down Italian, Greek and whatever else caught your fancy. I strongly recommend taking the same approach to Tokyo. Don't come here just for the Japanese food. Come here for food. And all you can drink beer gardens...more on that later. Hey, if you don't care for Japanese food come here and eat ANYTHING ELSE YOU CAN THINK OF. You want Michelin starred French at half the cost of New York or Paris?
Tokyo has you covered.

SO my plan here at my Tokyo Food blog is to show you a ton of food.
I want to help you answer some of those burning questions you may have about food in Tokyo.

Such as!

When should I take the tofu out of a hot pot?

Which sushi platter should i order?

Is that really raw horse?

What's the best bottle of vodka at the convenience store to make a roadie?

Am I really eating raw horse?

And why isn't my food dead yet?

But most impotantly I want to help you experience the foods here as the locals do. If you go out for Japanese food in particular, I want to make sure you know you're eating the good stuff.
Dont take my word for it though, I'm not from here.
Takao however is.
I'll just be translating for you.